Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 19, 2007 @07:18AM
from the i'll-believe-it-when-it's-on-my-laptop dept.

psychicsword writes "Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than 10 times as fast by adding fiber-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires." "The current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second, so a tenfold increase would be 4.8 gigabits per second." This should make USB hard drives easier and faster to use."

Oh good. Now I get to plunk down $20+ per cable for the latest USB standard. I really like that copper USB2 cables are just about down to free from some online retailers. Looks like that will not be the case with USB3.

In an interview after the speech, Gelsinger said there's typically a one- to two-year lag between the release of the specification and the availability of the technology,

In today's news, vendors worldwide urged one another to move quickly and get IPv6 deployed by the year 2025. When asked about the one or two year lag between the release of specs and the availability of the technology, vendors quickly pointed out the timeframe it took to implement Packet Over Bongo [eagle.auc.ca] and IPv6 for Refrigerators [glocom.org]. "It's been a long time in the making (IPv6) but we've finally succeeded in getting console connectivity to the fridge. We can now via a command prompt: finger lettuce" stated the happy refrigerator engineer. We never even knew of the existence of IPv4 for refrigerators. Engineers estimate another 20-80 year wait for IPv6.

with usb 2.0 hardware and drivers, Windows can get some pretty decent speeds with big hard drives, but Linux invariably falls back to 1.0 and the best rate I've seen with 2.6.any kernels is about 100kbs which translates into about 5 times dialup speed. This is somewhat below usb 2.0's theoretical capabilities, and the last backup I was able to make using linux, it took a week to backup 5 gigs to an external drive.

Give us a standard that actually delivers enough power that you don't need an additional power cord for just about every other device already...:/

According to Intel, the new USB 3 standard will use fiber optic cable for data as well as power. The data will be modulated on a high-powered laser light signal, enough to deliver the power to spin up a harddisk, or, alternatively, burn through one solid oaken office door as well as the sales guy who was about to open said door.